https://www.theaustralian.com.au/wo...e/news-story/da2e2c1045b7f00a36119c831801e12f Coronavirus: Horror death toll at veterans’ home Flags and wreaths honour veterans on the grounds of the Soldiers' Home in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Picture: AP. Cameron Stewart WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT 10:34PM April 29, 2020 6 Comments US health and police officials are scrambling to find out what went wrong in the nation’s deadliest outbreak of COVID-19 after 70 residents died at a Massachusetts home for ageing veterans. While the death toll at the state-run Holyoke Soldiers Home continues to climb, authorities are investigating whether residents were denied proper medical care. Sixty-six veterans who tested positive for the virus have died, and the cause of another death is unknown. Another 83 residents and 81 staff have tested positive. The home’s superintendent accused state officials of falsely claiming they were unaware of the scope of the problem there. Superintendent Bennett Walsh said earlier this month state officials knew that the home was in “crisis mode” when it came to staffing shortages and were notified early and often about the contagion at the centre. Nurse Joan Miller said workers from one unit were constantly moving to other units to help out — and bringing their germs with them. “Veterans were on top of each other,” she said. “We didn’t know who was positive and who was negative and then they grouped people together and that really exacerbated it even more.” The death toll at the home appears to be the largest at a long-term care home in the US, experts said. A key model used by the White House — forecasts by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — has raised the total level of likely deaths in the US to 74,000 by early August. Several weeks ago the institute predicted 60,000 deaths by early August, a number President Donald Trump said was a vast improvement on initial predictions of between 100,000 and 220,000. The number of confirmed cases in the US passed one million on Tuesday, with 58,343 deaths, exceeding the 58,220 American lives lost during the Vietnam War. The institute said the new higher forecast reflected “many states experiencing flatter and thus longer epidemic peaks” as well as data showing that daily coronavirus deaths “are not falling very quickly after the peak, leading to longer tails for many states’ epidemic curves”. The US death rate is expected to be higher than the latest forecast because it does not take into account any deaths during the northern autumn and winter when experts fear there could be a second wave. Mr Trump said the US would be in a position to handle any second wave of the virus later this year and that within months the country would have the ability to test five million people for the virus each day. As it stands, only 200,000 people are being tested each day, a number experts say is not nearly enough to get a clear picture of the rate of infections at a time when states are starting to reopen their economies. In a live-streamed video chat with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton said Mr Trump had failed to listen to intelligence warnings about the looming pandemic. “The one thing I’d have done, Joe, which you know so well — I would have read my daily intelligence briefings that were sounding alarms since January, but, apparently, this President does not do it. We used to do it,” Mrs Clinton said. “What a difference it would make right now if we had a president who not only listened to the science (and) put facts over fiction, but brought us together.” At least 13 states have begun to reopen their economy, although several of them, such as Georgia, have done so despite not having the sustained fall in new cases that was recommended as a precondition by the White House’s federal guidelines. The country’s top infectious diseases expert, Anthony Fauci, warned on Tuesday that premature action by states could lead to “a rebound to get us right back in the same boat that we were in a few weeks ago”. additional reporting: AP Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia